A Bluer Shade of White
by alexanderwales
Summary: Six years after her coronation, Elsa rules over Arendelle, using the power of ice to improve the lives of her citizens.
1. Chapter 1

Workmen dumped barrels of sawdust into the water, until it was a dark slurry.

"Make sure it's stirred up for the Queen," called Admiral Pyke to the workmen. He turned towards the queen. "I've found the proper ratio is about six parts water to one part sawdust by weight, your majesty," he said with a gentle smile. "But the mixture must be almost completely homogeneous to work as it should."

Elsa nodded politely. The Admiral was in his mid-thirties, but he somehow seemed younger than her, even if he was really ten years older. He had a healthy enthusiasm for ships in all their glory, and his office was decorated with small models that he'd made himself. He'd once joked that they were simply a grown man's way of continuing to play with toys. That he was without wife or children added somewhat to his seeming youth.

Elsa watched the slurry being mixed around. The air was cool, as it was most days in Arendelle. The experiment was taking place in a drydock, which had been filled with a very specific amount of seawater for their purposes. The workers used long paddles from a ship to stir the slurry around. When they were finished, Pyke nodded to Elsa, and she raised her hands for a bit of theatrics.

Her power coursed through her. She could feel the chill in the slurry, and it took but a thought for her to begin the process of shaping the water into ice. She didn't need her hands, but of course there was the usual group of gawkers and rubberneckers that congregated nearly everywhere she went, eager to see a use of her famed power. It was better for them to have a story that they could take home, and so she waved her hands about and let off small jets of snow as she shaped the ship.

"It may be hard to form ice, your majesty, as one of the many properties is the slow rate of melt," said Admiral Pyke, but by the time he'd finished his sentence the ship was already halfway built.

In the early years, they'd tried making ships from plain ice. Shipbuilding was a difficult and labor-intensive process, and having Elsa craft a ship from nothing but seawater would have been a great boon to not only the navy of Arendelle, but to the merchant fleet as well. They had tried it, but the ice was too prone to cracking and melting, even with a number of variations they'd experimented with. Elsa could make a small rowboat, but anything larger would crack the moment it hit rough seas.

Pyke called the new material pykrete, and it was invented to address the earlier problems. It would still be a ship for cold waters, and wouldn't last too long if taken south in the summer, but if the pykrete ships worked out they would save the country a small fortune. It was amazing what a little sawdust could do when added to the ice.

Elsa built a ship from the blueprints Pyke had given to her, a heavy ship that would take a crew of thirty. There was much more to a ship than Elsa could make with ice, at least if she wanted it to survive away from her continuous influence - pulleys, ropes, and sails would all have to be made to fit out the ship. It was a start though, another ingenious use of her power, and unfortunately another way that the people of Arendelle were made dependent on her.

"Do your tests, Admiral," said Elsa with a nod after the ship had been made. She'd crafted struts for it that would snap as soon as the drydock was flooded, and the ship stood gleaming in the sunlight. Elsa had added a few embellishments to it, and if not for the fact that it was made of ice and sawdust it might have been a match for any ship in the Crystal Sea. If Pyke was right, perhaps it would overcome its humble origins. "I look forward to reading your report."

"You're not staying to watch?" he asked. He wasn't quite able to disguise the hurt in his voice. She knew that he had an affection for her that went above and beyond the normal admiration and respect that her subjects displayed. When she remembered, she wore her ice dress higher when she was around him, keeping the throat of it closed and her breasts fully covered, a more demure look than she would naturally tend towards. Pyke was handsome and intelligent, a good natured man with much to offer, but of course it would never have worked between the two of them. He'd never made a move towards courting her, but she wasn't sure whether that was because she was his superior or because of simple fear of rejection.

"I have a meeting with the Duke of Weselton," said Elsa. "But I look forward to seeing your report on how the ship holds up under stress. In its final form we'll have more in the way of reinforcing support, but - well, you know what needs doing." She offered him a smile.

"Yes, your Majesty," Pyke replied with a faint smile of his own.

Pyke was far from the first man to pine for Elsa, and she was fairly certain that he wouldn't be the last. Most people treated her with deference, and some with awe, but there were certain men who had an admiration for her. They liked her power, not simply the title of queen, but the raw power of her magic. Some people coveted it, and some wished to exploit it, but others like Pike simply wanted to be close to her, to see where the ever increasing power would take her.

She didn't doubt that some men found her attractive in her own right. She made one wall of her room into a mirror of ice every morning, and took a long look at herself before dressing. She was pale, with hair so blonde it was sometimes mistaken for white. Her skin was flawless, though whether it was because of the cold that permeated her to her core or simply a gift of her birth she couldn't say. Pretty, yes, but even when she was resting and calm there was something in her nature that she could see might keep people at a distance, and it wasn't just the enormous amounts of power she wielded.

Walking back to the palace was an exercise in keeping up a smiling face and pretending at humility and grace. By and large, the people of Arendelle loved her. Her power had given rise to a booming economy, and peace and prosperity like the kingdom had never seen before. Anna and Kristoff were more loved, of course, and Elsa had allowed them to take up as many of the traditional royal duties as possible. Anna opened the market in the morning, and Kristoff would smash a bottle of wine against the prow of a newly made ship. Elsa would consign herself to the library to work out a better tax policy. They all played to their strengths and worked together in harmony to keep the kingdom happy. Anna and Kristoff had three children now, and so had less time to visit and idly talk. Anna could often be seen carrying her youngest around town with the two older children following close behind.

Elsa often told herself that she wasn't lonely.

When she had finally made her way through the mindless chatter of her subjects and her hands had been warmed by shaking a dozen hands, she closed the doors to the Great Hall behind her and made her way up to the sitting room. Olaf was in front of the fire, roasting a marshmallow as his own personal storm cloud kept him from melting.

"Hiya!" he called to her. His marshmallow combusted as he looked at her with a goofy grin.

"Hello Olaf," said Elsa with a sigh.

"Aw, what's got you down?" asked Olaf. "It's a beautiful day!"

"I've been thinking too much," said Elsa.

"Never been a problem for me!" said Olaf.

"Have you seen the Duke of Weselton?" asked Elsa.

"He's in the library," said Olaf. He turned back towards the fire, not seeming to mind that his marshmallow was a blackened cinder, "Do you ever think that books are like a marshmallow?"

"No," said Elsa.

"Yeah, me neither," said Olaf.

The library was one of Elsa's favorite places in the whole of the palace, and the Duke of Weselton sat in the chair right next to the one Elsa had worn a groove in, waiting for her.

"Did you know," he said as she came in, "That the princess of Corona had the power to heal people with her hair?"

"I did," said Elsa with a nod. "She lost the power when her hair was cut, if I recall."

"And yet it raises so many interesting questions, doesn't it?" asked the Duke. "How did the magic know what a healed person was like? How did it know what to fix and what to leave as it was? If a person lost a finger, would the magic have known what to make a new finger look like? It was fabled to even have the ability to reverse aging, yet how did it know to remove the wrinkles and tighten skin? It suggests either that the magic could read the intentions of the princess, or that there is some true platonic ideal which the magic was hewing to. The princess wasn't a surgeon of course, and yet it's claimed that she could heal a broken bone or even internal injuries without knowing the specifics of what was actually wrong."

The new Duke of Weselton took after his father before him in many ways. He was short and wiry, with thick glasses and a moustache that bordered on ridiculous. Where his father was an arrogant and greedy military man, the new duke was energetic and boundlessly helpful. He'd taken the title two years prior, and had spent much of his time in Arendelle since then, almost exclusively in the company of Elsa. His name was Quincy, but for the most part they called each other by their titles.

"I suppose you're going to relate the healing hair to my own power?" Elsa asked.

The duke blinked twice. "Why of course I was. You see, the central question here is one of agency and intellect. Does your cryokinesis have some guiding intelligence of its own? Olaf can know things that you don't know, but if the brain is indeed the seat of the soul, what then of a snowman without a brain?"

"Have you ever thought to come to me without questions?" asked Elsa.

"Where would be the fun in that?" asked the duke with a smile. When she didn't return it, he frowned. "What's the matter?"

"This power," said Elsa. "I look out over my kingdom and I see a thousand uses for it, perhaps a hundred of which I've put into practical application. Yet part of being queen is looking beyond the here and now and instead thinking of what the kingdom will be like in two or three generations. What becomes of the kingdom when I die? If I were killed in the middle of the night by an assassin, entire industries would collapse."

"Surely you exaggerate," said the duke. "The kingdom existed long before you, and will exist long after."

"We're gradually putting ourselves in a position where the entire kingdom depends upon my power," said Elsa. "The kingdom of old was robust, but the kingdom as it stands now is built on the possibilities of limitless ice and snow. What happens when that foundation crumbles? What will the kingdom do when the houses that I've built of ice begin to melt after my death? If I die at eighty, will anyone even remember how to harvest ice from the lakes for themselves?"

"My, you really are in a mood," said the duke. "You worry about the diplomatic aspects as well."

"It wouldn't do to discuss that with one of the parties in question," said Elsa with a small laugh.

"We are your stalwart allies," said the duke.

"And it has nothing to do with the prospect of facing me on the field of combat?" asked Elsa.

"That's part of it," said the duke. "There are benefits to being your ally, and a great many reasons not be your enemy. More than seeing you stalking towards a fortress with scythe made of ice and crystalline armor, we worry that you would simply visit an eternal winter upon us. You could bury our kingdom in snow and ice from the safety of your palace, and we could do nothing to stop you. Eventually we would either be force to capitulate or die of starvation and frostbite. If I said these scenarios didn't factor into our calculations, you'd take me for a fool or a liar. But I have to say that the more we get to know you, the better we like you, and the happier we are the your power would fall into the hands of someone as kind and just as you are."

"Do you feel that I'd be swayed by such simple flattery?" asked Elsa. Yet she could feel herself buoyed by his words, and her dark mood began to leave her. "What did you come here to talk about, anyway?"

"Can't a man come for a simple chat with his favored queen?" asked the duke with a smile.

"Not in my experience, no," said Elsa. "You want me to try something with my power again?"

The duke nodded. "The ice mills worked wonderfully, didn't they?"

"Yes," said Elsa with a slight frown. "But it's yet another way that the kingdom grows dependent upon me."

The ice mills sat on the edge of town. They were designed much like a watermill or windmill, with a large central shaft that was used to operate any number of things - an oscillating saw, a grinder to turn wheat into flour, a loom to spin fibers into thread and weave thread into fabric, or a dozen other things that could translate the simple spinning on the axle into some kind of useful work. The difference with the ice mills was in the form of motive power. Each of them had an ice beast that stood two stories tall and spent its day turning a crank. The practical effect was that Arendelle had more mills than all the neighboring kingdoms combined, and even without a pykrete fleet it made a good deal of economic sense for other kingdoms to send their raw materials to Arendelle to be transformed into finished goods. If the tests of the pykrete went well, it was quite possible that Arendelle would be responsible for nearly all of the milling within a few hundred miles.

"We don't know for certain that the snow beasts will evaporate or cease their movement in the event of your death," said the duke. "It may well be that they continue on, giving you all the more incentive to make as much as possible. And - forgive me for saying it your majesty, but we don't know for certain that you can die in the first place."

"Ridiculous," Elsa said, though she'd had the same thought every so often.

"I've known you for six years now, more or less," said the duke. "You haven't aged a day. The physical effects of your magic are unknown, but an immunity to the cold and a lower body temperature might only be the tip of the iceberg, if you'll forgive the pun. But that's not what I wanted to discuss - I wanted to talk about Olaf."

"No," said Elsa.

"I haven't gotten around to asking my question," protested the duke.

"I know what it will be," said Elsa. "We had the same conversation with regards to the ice beasts that power the mills. I agreed to make them because they would have no driving intelligence, no consciousness and sentience. Olaf is something else, a living creature with his own thoughts and feelings. I won't create such a thing lightly."

"I don't ask you to," said the duke. "But surely you can see the benefits inherent in creating a workforce. The people of Arendelle wouldn't have to do the dangerous jobs of mining and hunting anymore. They could spend their lives in leisure."

"And in exchange, a new race of slaved golems would take up their work," said Elsa. She shook her head. "There's a reason I haven't created any more ice creatures like Olaf - and him I created on accident."

"Then make Olaf better," said the duke. "Please, this is such an opportunity, I'd be remiss if I didn't try my best to convince you to expand your powers."

Elsa was silent for a moment. She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. "Better how?"

"I don't know," said the duke. "Stronger, faster, smarter, more focused - better." He'd gained enthusiasm as they talked, and was now animated with a bubbling energy. While she didn't appreciate the pressure he was applying, this was how she liked the duke best. He could become a man with an expansive imagination and a clearly visible passion.

"I'm not going to change his mind around," said Elsa. "No more than I would change your mind around if it were in my power."

"Even if that's what he wanted?" asked the duke. "Even if he requested an enhancement?"

Elsa paused again. "Maybe then."

They made the trip down the wide hallways of the palace, back to the sitting room where Olaf still sat roasting marshmallows. He couldn't eat them, since he had no stomach, so instead he'd simply set them in his mouth for a bit and let them melt his snow before putting them back on the stick - which was his left arm, in fact.

"Olaf, do you want to be smarter?" asked Elsa.

"Boy do I!" said Olaf with his dopey smile.

"You do?" she asked.

"The reindeer keeps beating me in checkers," said Olaf. "And he doesn't even know how to play."

Elsa turned to the duke, who nodded.

"Olaf, I'm going to try to change you now," said Elsa. "Is that alright with you?"

"Sure!" said Olaf. "But I'm not even wearing my diaper."

"No, I'm going to make you smarter," said Elsa gently.

"'kay," said Olaf.

Elsa turned to the duke again, who had a giddy grin on his face. She considered Olaf to be a living creature independent of herself, but she was one of the few people who felt that way. The others couldn't feel the power that Olaf had, a small shard of herself that was settled over him like a cloak. She didn't feel lesser for having Olaf in the world, nor for having created Marshmallow or the ice beasts that ran the mills, it was more like she'd copied a small part of herself to power them. They were of her, and without experiencing that sensation for themselves, most people would simply assume that her creations were only puppets propped up by her in some way, even after she'd explained it to them. Making ice was one thing; making life was another.

She reached for that shard of herself, a reflection of her childhood, crafted by accident without her having even known about it. When she closed her eyes, she could see it clearly, the embodiment of the time that she'd spent with Anna in the Great Hall.

Elsa didn't know quite what she was doing, but she pressed on anyway, trying her best to add in more memories of an older girl, one who spent a great deal of time with her nose in books, studying the histories of the kingdoms to learn the lessons she'd need to be queen. Olaf's mind wasn't an ordered thing, or even all that predictable. Instead, it was a chaotic swirl of parts of herself, along with new pieces that she could only imagine had been created from whole cloth as he lived out his life. All of it was bound together by her latent power. After a few minutes she had added everything that she could think to add, and she pulled back from Olaf, who had been standing there patiently.

"Done," she said with a breath.

"Do you feel different?" the duke asked Olaf.

"Nope!" said Olaf. "But I don't really know what smart feels like, so maybe it doesn't feel like anything at all."

"We should run some tests," said the duke. "But perhaps we should have run the tests before any modifications were made in order to get a baseline."

"I love tests!" cried Olaf.

"Can you do math?" asked the duke. "I mean, could you do math before?"

"Math?" asked Olaf with a raised eyebrow. "What's that? Can you sum it up for me?" He laughed long and hard at his own joke. "But no, I can't do math."

"I'll explain the basics to you, and we can move from there," said the duke.

"We'll leave him be," said Elsa. "I don't think it worked."

"No?" asked the duke. "Well, that doesn't mean that we can't try again with another creation."

They left the sitting room, and the duke idly chattered away about future plans and a world of possibilities ahead of them. Elsa cast a look back at Olaf. She'd felt something happen. Though the duke was a close friend, he didn't need to know everything. Elsa would watch the changes herself.

* * *

_Author's Notes: Pykrete is a real thing, though it was invented in the 1940s during World War II instead of whenever Frozen takes place. It never saw widespread use, for a variety of reasons - mostly because the war ended. You can see it in action in Mythbusters episode 115._

_The question of when Frozen takes place is a fairly interesting one, but for this fic it's assumed that it takes place sometime between the 1750s and 1850s. It at the least post-dates the invention of the sandwich, mentioned in the song "Love is an open door". Also, the giant snow golem is named "Marshmallow", and the modern marshmallow wasn't invented until the 1800's when it became the snack we know and love today - and actually became white instead of being made with oats. The lack of firearms in favor of crossbows is a little curious given that timeline, but whatever._

_Sorry if I spammed your e-mail with story updates - kept eating my formatting, and I didn't realize it was so zealous about sending out updates from a repost._


	2. Chapter 2

Elsa had the dream again.

He was a strong man, who worked with his hands. He stalked towards her like a hunter towards its prey, calm and sure of himself. His hands were warm against her cold skin, and her normally sluggish heart beat a quick tempo in her chest.

She felt foolish when she woke up. She was twenty-seven years old, and shouldn't have been having such dreams. She cloaked herself in ice, a high collared dress with long sleeves that draped down, all held together with her magic. She fashioned a new crown of ice, like she wore most days, though the design of it changed based on her whims. It was a better symbol of her position within the kingdom than the royal jewels could ever be.

She took a breakfast of boiled eggs and preserved meats in library while she went through her correspondence, reading letters from distant lands. It was a pile of requests for aid, offers for alliance, and some of the false friendliness that royalty seemed required to send each other.

Elsa kept a part of her power attuned to the weather, which she had at least partial control over. She had never gotten the hang of making winds, though she'd heard it theorized that she could accomplish it by chilling and heating large volumes of air. Heating things always felt unnatural to her, a part of her power that didn't seem to quite fit. She'd never again been able to accomplish the reversal that she had done when she'd kissed Anna, when Arendelle's bay had gone from solid ice to clear water in a matter of hours, and the snows had melted in the space of a day. She could keep the weather mild though, and spare her people the storms.

"Something's wrong with Olaf," said Anna. She leaned against the doorway to the library, with her hands folded in front of her. If Elsa hadn't aged a day since her coronation, the same couldn't be said for her sister. Anna had just been a girl of eighteen then, young and naive. She'd saved the kingdom, and had fallen in love with Kristoff. Anna had promised to take things slow with him, to not rush in as she did with everything, but then they'd gotten married six months later, and had their first child five months after that. If Anna weren't beloved by everyone, the people of Arendelle might have done the math and frowned in disapproval. Motherhood had changed her some, and calmed her. Now her face was beginning to show subtle lines and wrinkles, and there were few who would call her girlish - she was womanly now, less carefree than she'd been before, but still quick to smile and make jokes.

"Wrong?" asked Elsa, as innocent as could be.

"He's reading to the kids," said Anna.

"He can't read," said Elsa. She set down the letter she'd been reading. "Or at least, he's never been able to before."

Anna's two oldest children were four and five, with the youngest still just a baby. They had their own rooms at the palace, far away from where the serious business of governance went on. Anna and Kristoff had talked about moving to the country somewhere several times, but that idle talk had never resulted in concrete action, for which Elsa was grateful.

Anna and Elsa watched as Olaf read to the children. He had the book upside down, but seemed to be reading the words all the same. It was a children's book that recounted the story of a devil that made a cursed mirror, and from what Elsa could tell the words he was saying matched the story she remembered. When the children saw her, they got up from their seats on the floor and rushed to hug Elsa around the legs.

"Auntie Elsa!" cried Bjorn. "How come you never come to visit us?"

"I came to visit three days ago," said Elsa. She knelt down and wrapped both children in a hug. "We had tea together, do you remember?"

"But it was so long ago!" said Gerda.

"I sent Olaf as my emissary," said Elsa with a smile. "Isn't that right Olaf?"

"Yeppers!" said Olaf. Whatever changes had happened in his head, he wore the same dopey grin as before.

"Olaf, when did you learn to read?" asked Anna.

"Yesterday," said Olaf. "It's pretty easy when you realize that all of the words are made up of letters."

"Olaf, you're holding the book upside down," said Elsa.

Olaf looked down to where his branches grasp the pages. "Am I?" he asked. "What does it say when it's the right way up then?"

"It says the same thing," said Elsa, "You read from top to bottom and left to right."

"Ooooh," said Olaf. He paused for a beat. "I don't get it."

"Nevermind," said Elsa. She looked down at the children. "Go listen to uncle Olaf read you a story."

"But you'll stay to play with us?" asked Gerda.

"Of course," said Elsa. "There are just a few things that your mother and I have to discuss, we'll be just outside."

The children went back to sit next to the snowman, while Elsa and Anna walked a short distance down the hall.

"You're unhappy," said Anna. It was more of a statement of fact than a question.

"I'm … I have a lot going on in my life," said Elsa.

Anna put her arm on her sister's shoulder. "I care about you, you know that. And with your power, your emotions can sometimes play into how it expresses itself. I worry about you."

"My power is fine," said Elsa. "I have it under control. I use it so much now that it's practically second nature to me. The power wants to be used, and so I use it."

"What's going on with Olaf then?" asked Anna.

"I changed him," said Elsa. "Just a little. I tried to make him smarter. It was the duke's idea."

"The duke of Weasel Town?" asked Anna.

"Weselton," said Elsa, though they'd had this conversation a half dozen times before.

"But they raise weasels," said Anna, "It's got to be Weasel Town."

"They raise civets for their musk," said Elsa.

"And a civet is a type of weasel," said Anna proudly.

"No, it's not," said Elsa with a sigh. "It's no more of a weasel than a mongoose is a weasel. You could be forgiven for thinking that a civet is a weasel, but all the same, it's not nice to call it Weasel Town. They're our allies."

They both turned toward the playroom and listened to Olaf in silence for a moment. Anna was just being silly, and Elsa had to go bringing facts into it. They were sisters, and they loved each other, but sometimes it was easy to see the gulf between the two of them, and the ways that they weren't quite compatible.

"You can really do that? Make him smarter?" asked Anna.

"Apparently," said Elsa. "It's odd, going into his mind. Marshmallow and the snow beasts aren't nearly so complicated. The more I looked, the more I could see there, and I felt like I could simply have looked forever, always finding something new in his thoughts. All his memories were there, from the time that he was first created. And more than that, there were our memories - my memories - from when we'd made him. It feels like that was ages ago, doesn't it?"

They were silent together for awhile, as Olaf read children's stories in the background.

"Why do it?" asked Anna.

"I don't know," said Elsa. "I've been feeling like I need to do something more with my life. The duke asked me to, of course, but it's more than that."

"More with your life?" asked Anna with an arched eyebrow. "You're the queen of the most prosperous kingdom in the world."

"I appreciate that, I do," said Elsa. "And the kingdom means the world to me, but I sometimes look at your and Kristoff, and your children, and … well."

Anna let out a long sigh. "You can talk to me about these things. In fact, you should talk to me about those things. Even after what happened after the coronation, you bottle things up so much. It's not healthy, and with your power … well, we know what happened last time. If you want children, all we need to do is find you the right man, and given how eligible you are that shouldn't be -"

"I can't have children," said Elsa softly.

Anna stood back a step. "Says who?"

"Three different midwives, all highly regarded, as well as a doctor from Italy," Elsa replied. "My body is colder than normal, nearly thirty degrees on Lord Kelvin's scale. Everyone I've talked to has said that it's unlikely that I could have a child, though there's some disagreement on what the problem will be. The doctor suggested that the children would be stillborn, while two of the midwives told me it was unlikely I'd be able to become pregnant at all. Do you remember when mother told us about a woman's blood? I've never had that, not once in my life, and the midwives took that as a very bad sign."

"Oh Elsa," said Anna. She wrapped her sister in a hug. Elsa felt a tear roll down her face. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I'd had concerns for awhile, practically since mom and dad … since they passed," said Elsa. "I decided to ask around just after Bjorn was born. And of course you had your hands full then, and it didn't seem proper to overshadow your firstborn with my own unhappy news. After that, it seemed easier to deal with on my own."

"We'll … we'll find something, some way. The world full of so many things Elsa, so many wonders, there's got to be something," said Anna. She was crying, and Elsa didn't know what to do to comfort her.

It felt good to tell someone, to get that truth out there. There was nothing that Anna could do, but at least she could empathize. Elsa listened to Olaf reading the children another story in the playroom while Anna cried. The duke had talked about progress and advancement, but for Elsa it was something deeper and more primal - the hope that she might create something that would outlast her. There were other problems, but Elsa knew that they were small and petty, more the product of her own mind than anything she should whine about.

Four years ago she'd been hosting one of the grand balls that Anna liked so much. Elsa had danced a slow waltz with a handsome prince from a faraway kingdom, and they'd talked throughout the whole of it, gliding around the Great Hall with a gentle rise and fall. She'd talked about the ice garden she kept near the palace, full of sculptures she'd made herself, and the prince talked about his many sisters and the horse-riding they'd do together.

Afterwards, they'd gone to one of the balconies together, and looked out over the Crystal Sea. They talked for a bit, and then she turned to face him, and he turned to face her, and they kissed each other. At twenty-four, it was her first real kiss. She'd felt herself blushing and pulled back from him, and she saw a look on his face that almost instantly crushed her spirit. He was thinking of how cold her lips were, and thinking of what it would be like to have those be the only lips that he touched for the rest of his life. He was reconsidering her, in an unfavorable light.

Elsa was well aware of the double entendre intended when she was called "The Snow Queen". Perhaps the prince was thinking less delicate thoughts that caused the frown to grace his face after kissing her.

Later, she'd heard laughter from a group the prince was with, along with the words "cold fish". Anna tried to convince her otherwise, but she knew she was the subject of conversation. It was a casual cruelty that had stayed with her for a long time.

Elsa wished that she could change herself as easily as she had changed Olaf. If only she could splay her mind open and remove all of the anxiety and insecurity, all the bad memories, the resentment she felt towards her parents for keeping her locked away, her anger with the trolls for removing Anna memories and setting their life on a dangerous course …

For now, improving Olaf would have to do. Perhaps she could create a more perfect Arendelle, and that would fill the hole in her heart.


	3. Chapter 3

The pykrete ships were an unqualified success. They needed to be constructed differently from a regular ship, with a much thicker hull and an appearance more like a barge than a sailing ship, but given that they cost next to nothing, it was deemed well worth it. Elsa built the ships, while Admiral Pyke oversaw. Mixing the slurry of sawdust and seawater took the bulk of the time, and Pyke had ordered a second drydock constructed just so that they could increase production and take as little of the queen's time as possible.

"We can add sawdust to the list of Arendelle's imports, your majesty," said Pyke with a smile. "We'll need tons of the stuff to get an entire fleet of the pykrete ships moving goods about the Crystal Sea."

"Olaf, make a note of it," said Elsa with a forced smile as she put the finishing touches on another ship. It was difficult to make them look attractive, due to the engineering involved. She'd done embellishments on the first one, and now felt compelled to continue on the others, though it was taking more time than she'd anticipated.

Olaf flipped open a small notebook that he kept with him and made marks with a pencil.

"He's been following you around much more than usual, your majesty," said Pyke.

"Olaf has picked up some skills of late," said Elsa. She turned to the snowman as the last piece of the ship was finished. "Haven't you?"

"Yes ma'am!" said Olaf. He looked down at the markings he'd scrawled on notebook. "It's hard to write in a notebook with sticks for hands." He looked to Elsa. "Can I change them?"

"Change them?" asked Elsa. "You want your hands to be something else?"

"Ice hands," nodded Olaf with a grin. "Can I?"

"I can make the change, I think," said Elsa. "We can discuss what you'd like later."

"Oh," said Olaf. "I can do it myself, I just wanted to know if it was okay with you."

"He can do that?" asked Pyke.

"You can do that?" asked Elsa.

"Only one way to find out," said Olaf with his lopsided grin. He pulled both of his arms off in a way that should have been impossible, and then with a grunt of concentration began to protrude small nubs of snow from the side of his body where the sticks had been. Olaf took a deep breath - absurd, since he didn't need to breathe and had no lungs - and with closed eyes and a furrowed brow the two nubs extruded icicles, which cracked and branched at the end to form sharp tines for fingers. They looked somewhat like a falcon's talons. Olaf opened his eyes and looked down at his new hands. "Shiny," he whispered. He looked up at them, and must have seen something in their eyes, because the hands changed shape, rounding out the fingers to make them bulbous and non-threatening.

Pyke leaned close to Elsa. "He has some of your power," he said.

"Yes and no," said Elsa. "By his very nature he would have to have some of it, or he would fall apart the first time he was speared through the face with a carrot. In creating him I gave him incidental access to the power - perhaps more than I'd initially thought."

"And if you made other constructs," said Pyke. "They would have the same access?"

"I believe so," said Elsa.

"Are you still opposed to making more?" asked Pyke. "We lack for sailors -"

"You've been talking to the duke of Weselton," said Elsa.

"We had dinner together when he was last in Arendelle," said Pyke. "He has a point, your majesty."

"Where does it end, if I begin creating such things?" asked Elsa.

"They could do simple jobs," said Pyke. "To man the blige would take no more thought than what the creatures that move the mills display. You've offered us a golem for each ship to drive a propeller, and with that we'll be able to cross the Crystal Sea in half the time, but much of the work on a ship is done by rote, like the loading and firing of the cannons, and if we could have a golem that would manufacture cannonballs of pykrete, we would have room to store much more gunpowder, cargo, or cannons."

"If it came down to it, I could simply make a construct that fired missiles of ice and forgo the idea of cannons altogether," said Elsa. "I could make a person of ice that could sink a ship from half a mile away, with no need for the maneuvering of cannonfire. Again I have to ask where it ends? Arendelle exists in a time of peace, and it's detrimental to diplomacy to appear too threatening. Beyond that, I have reservations about creating new life. I'm sure if you've spoken to the duke you know what those reservations are."

"Yes, your majesty," said Pyke. Unlike the duke, the admiral knew when to drop a topic of conversation.

When the twelfth ship of the day was complete, Elsa and Olaf walked back to the palace together. It was a much colder day than usual, part of the weather patterns that Elsa had designed for the kingdom. The schedule was posted in town centers, so that her subjects had some forewarning when the weather would be less than ideal. Early in her reign, Elsa had tried to keep the weather sunny and verdant all the time, but the population of reindeer had increased rapidly, and soon thereafter the wolves followed suit. When the reindeer had stripped the woods bare of anything to eat, they began to die of starvation, and when the wolves ran out of reindeer they moved closer to the settlements. It was an important lesson in unintended consequences, and Elsa had changed to the weather to more closely match what was natural for the region.

Aside from all that, Elsa enjoyed the brisk cold. Most of the people of Arendelle had elected to stay indoors, and so Elsa and Olaf walked alone.

"Do you like me?" asked Olaf.

"Like you?" asked Elsa. "Of course I like you."

"Only it's just that when you talk to people you keep saying that you don't want to make more people like me," said Olaf with a small frown.

"Oh Olaf, it's nothing to do with you, you're wonderful, but I worry about just … creating living things," said Elsa.

"But why?" asked Olaf.

"It's complicated," said Elsa.

"I might be able to understand," said Olaf. He didn't seem like he was paying attention to her, and instead stared at his new hands as they walked, flexing them and subtly changing their shape to better suit him.

"I consider you a person," said Elsa. "I made you, and I'm responsible for you. All of the memories you started with, all of the personality, that all came from me, and to a lesser extent the ways that you learn and grow are a result of the mind I gave you. That's an enormous burden, more than having a child I would guess, because if you do something wrong, or you get hurt, there's no one that the blame can fall on but me."

"You're worried someone would blame you?" asked Olaf.

Elsa shook her head. "I would blame myself," she said. "The duke talks about creating an entire race of people like you, but that thought frightens me more than I think he can understand. After my coronation, when the blizzard settled over Arendelle, it was a miracle that no one died. If Anna hadn't come to me to let me know, hundreds of people would have been without food or firewood, trapped in their houses until their froze to death." Elsa went without speaking for a moment. For the first few months after everything had been resolved, Elsa had a recurring nightmare of coming down off High Mountain into Arendelle and finding corpses frozen solid in every house. "My power gives me a responsibility. It needs to be used in the most cautious possible way.

"If I made a sailor, like the admiral wants me to, would I make him love sailing? Would he have any agency in his life, any freedom of choice? He could make friends easily, or be a loner, he could - I don't know, he could like to eat pickled beets or hate the color green. And if I make him more organically, and let my intuition guide me, then what happens if he's unhappy? That would be my fault, wouldn't it?"

"I'm happy," said Olaf with satisfaction.

"I know you are," said Elsa, "And I'm glad. But it's more difficult than just solving a complicated problem and making people in the correct way. Do you know what happens to you when I die? If I made a thousand people with their own thoughts and personalities only to have them die with me … well. There are good reasons that I haven't done more with that aspect of my power." In truth, she sometimes dreamed up things beyond what the duke had ever come up with, creations that she would keep confined to her own mind instead of speaking aloud. Sheets of sentient snow a mile wide that couldn't be killed by even the largest bonfire, intelligent icebergs that would seek out and sink enemy ships, manufactories with a will of their own that could rearrange their innards to produce any variety of good a person might want. By comparison, men made of ice represented a failure of imagination.

Olaf frowned. "Life is about living, it's not supposed to be about worrying about the future. We can't keep ourselves from doing good things just because they might come to an end some day. You make ice sculptures, even though you know they're going to melt, right?"

Olaf actually had a point. It was the first time that had ever happened. They continued walking on in silence while Elsa tried to mull over her options.

"What do you want?" asked Olaf. His eyebrows were furrowed, and he was staring at her with more concentration than she'd ever seen on his face before.

"Safety and security, for myself, my family, and my subjects. Peace on earth." If she'd been talking to anyone but a snowman, she was certain that she would have been accused of giving safe answers. She looked around for a moment, and made sure that the streets were still empty of anyone trying to overhear. "Love. Someone who doesn't shrink back from my cold skin or treat me like I need warming up. An equal, I suppose, though I have no idea who that could possibly be." She paused again. "Children, or … I don't know." She turned to look at Olaf. "Why?"

"Well, I've kind of sort of been trying to figure out what I want," said Olaf. "Goofing around was fun for a couple of years, but now I keep learning all these things, and I don't think goofing around is really me anymore."

Elsa said nothing, unsure of what there was to say. She nearly offered to change him back, but she wasn't sure whether she even could. She'd changed him in ways that were more intuitive than explicit - if she ever did want to make a host of ice sailors, she'd need to have a better handle on creating explicit instructions for them. She reached for his mind, just to take a look, and found it more complicated than before, a five course meal instead of a simple stew. Most days Olaf could be found reading in the library, putting his newfound literacy to use, and that accounted for much of his growth. She wasn't sure that Olaf had any concept of privacy, but she kept her observation to a minimum.

The duke of Weselton was waiting in the sitting room when they got to the palace.

"I wasn't aware that you were back in Arendelle," said Elsa with a smile.

"Always lovely you see you, your majesty," said the duke. "I hadn't planned to return so soon, but your sister sent me a strongly worded letter about what ideas I've been discussing with you, including those about that marvelous snowman of yours. The letter had quite the opposite effect from what Anna intended, I'm sure." He had a wide grin on his face. The duke looked to Olaf. "You've changed his hands."

"I changed them myself," said Olaf with a grin.

"He can do that?" asked the duke with delight. "How wonderful. I wish I could change my form as I desire, to suit whatever purpose I saw before me."

"Being able to wear what I chose and alter it on a whim has been one of the unexpected benefits to my power," said Elsa. "Though I can't say that I would want hands of ice."

"Olaf, can you change yourself in other ways?" asked the duke. Elsa felt a twinge of annoyance as the duke's attention shifted.

"What other ways?" asked Olaf.

"As an example … can you alter your own mind? Can you make yourself smarter, like Elsa did when I was here last?" asked the duke.

"Olaf, could you excuse us for a moment?" Elsa asked.

Olaf looked between the two of them. His mouth hung slightly open, and for a brief moment he seemed like his former self again. "'kay," he said, and waddled out of the room.

"You like my power," said Elsa after she'd shut the door behind Olaf. An unexpected chill crept into her voice.

"I do," said the duke. "Not just for its own sake, but it's so versatile and surprising. It ties into the deeper mysteries of the universe, don't you think?"

"You like it too much," said Elsa.

The duke was momentarily taken aback. "Your majesty, if I've overstepped my bounds in some way or said something to give you cause for offense, I can do nothing but offer my most humble apologies to you."

"No," Elsa sighed. She worked to bury her annoyance. "I just … I know that sometimes we joke about it, but I haven't missed the fact that you only come calling when my power is involved, when you've thought up some new invention or want to see the result of some test."

"Your majesty," the duke began, but it was clear that he had no idea where to go with the rest of that sentence.

"I'm sorry. The only thing you've done to offend me is to show some honest curiosity, and that should never be cause for a person to take offense. I've been thinking of other things, and you're unfortunate enough to have caught my ire," said Elsa. "I sometimes wonder how I can have so much that life has to offer and yet be so unhappy. It seems patently absurd." Elsa looked towards the window. "Olaf has a bit of my power, but I would appreciate if you refrained from making him the new object of your … enthusiasm."

There was a knock at the door, which saved the duke from having to formulate a response. Elsa moved to open it, and before her stood Olaf, looking quite proud of himself.

"I did it!" said Olaf. "I made myself smarter!" He looked back and forth between the two of them with the same dopey smile he'd always had, and his face slowly fell. "Is that not okay?"

"It's perfectly fine," said Elsa. "The duke was just suffering my bad mood."

"Your majesty," stammered the duke, finally spilling out words in a rush. "I don't know quite what ails you, but if I could assist you in any way, you have to know that I would. If it's loneliness - if you wish me to court you -"

"That will be enough," said Elsa. She could feel her face flush. "Let's not embarrass each other. Tomorrow I will be more myself, and we can discuss anything you wish. I'll forget what you've just said, if you'll agree to forget everything that's come from my mouth since the moment I came into this room."

"Agreed, your majesty," said the duke with a deep bow.

Elsa retired to her bedroom to think.

The duke had been a friend of hers since he'd taken the title from his father. He reminded her of Anna, in many ways. He would flit from subject to subject and idea to idea, never really giving his full attention to any particular topic. She'd visited his study in Weselton once, and it had been a place of dusty relics from bygone passions and half-finished notes. He was twenty-six years old, and had already started and abandoned three different memoirs of his life.

His offer for courtship wasn't entirely unexpected, though it was clear that neither of them had a romantic inclination towards the other. Still, they were both of high birth and roughly the same age, and so it hadn't been entirely unexpected. She had heard that sometimes it was better to take a marriage without any real affection in order to secure the family line, but the thought of the duke touching her with any warmth was nearly laughable, and the family line had little chance of propagation. She could only hope that their friendship hadn't been unduly damaged by her outburst, nor by his offer.

It had become clear to her that if she had sent Olaf off to live in Weselton with the duke, she wouldn't see either of them again unless she made a concerted effort to visit. The more she thought about the way the duke had talked to Olaf, the more upset she became. It was yet another reminder of how few solid connections she really had in her life, and how much her power interfered with her having a normal relationship of any kind, romantic or not.

She went to bed thinking of the world, and her place in it.

She awoke to the gentle touch of icy fingers.

* * *

_Author's Notes: The fluctuating reindeer population is a reference to St. Mathew's Island, a semi-famous case study on exploding herbivore boom-bust cycles._

I appreciate reviews, even the bad ones. Heck, maybe especially the bad ones, since they help me know when and why I should rewrite. This fic is about halfway done - the second half moves quite a bit faster.


	4. Chapter 4

She was having the dream again.

He was a large man, broad of shoulder and thick with hard-earned muscles. He was a lumberjack or a porter, some hard physical job of that nature, though in the dream it was never clearly defined. He locked eyes with her and stalked forward, towering over her. One of his hands wrapped around her waist, nearly encircling it, while the other grabbed her by the back of her neck, pulling her in for a kiss that she desperately wanted. When they moved back from each other, the man brushed her lips with his thumb, and she kissed the pad of it. He moved his hands lower after that. Her dress was made of ice, with no seams to speak of. Wherever he touched her, the dress parted for him, beckoning him to tear it from her.

He kissed her again, and his lips were delightfully cold.

Elsa opened her eyes, and for a moment the man was standing over her. His icy fingers were brushing her stomach, and her dress had opened itself to his wandering touch. She blinked twice. She was in her bedroom at the palace, laying on her back, but the man above her wasn't the one from her dream. He was more slender, his skin pale instead of tanned. He had a gentle smile on his face, and he continued to touch her softly. When he moved in for a kiss, Elsa screamed. The man tumbled backwards, falling off her bed.

Elsa had long been aware of the threat of assassination. With all her power, she was still mortal, and she had little doubt that a rival kingdom might seek a way to rid themselves of her when she was at her most vulnerable. It was for that reason that Elsa layered a solid three feet of ice on each wall each night before going to sleep, the ice so cold and solid that it should have been impossible for a would-be intruder to break through without making enough noise to wake her. So when she awoke with a strange man in her room, she first checked the walls of ice to see whether there had been a breach. They were all intact. Elsa repaired her clothing and reformed it around her into the most protective and severely chaste outfit she could think up.

"Who are you?" hissed Elsa at the man. He was sitting on the floor, rubbing at his head.

"I'm sorry, I thought that maybe it was a bad idea, but in my mind it was this nice romantic gesture, and -"

"Who. Are. You," said Elsa. She was ready to murder him at a moment's notice. Early in her reign, she'd procured a pig carcass and practiced on it in the privacy of the woods. There were a thousand ways to kill a person with her power. She could chill his body down low enough that it would shatter with a touch, stop his heart from a hundred paces, or encase him in ice, all with nothing more than a thought. Elsa formed a dagger of ice in each hand, more as a threat than for any practical reason.

"My name is Jack Frost," said the man. He held out a hand expectantly, but let it fall when it became clear to him that she wasn't going to touch him.

"Like the children's story?" Elsa asked.

"It's just a name I picked," he said. "I figured that you'd like it, that you would think it was fun."

Elsa looked closer at him. His skin wasn't just pale, it was white. His hair, in the dark, had looked blonde, but now that she'd woken up a bit she could see it for what it was - frost. The man, Jack, was made of snow, from his hands down to the bluish suit he wore. He was the most elaborately sculpted snowman that Elsa had ever seen, from the slivers of ice that he had in place of fingernails to the eyelashes made of frost. If she ignored the color, he could pass for a real person, and in the dark that's what she'd initially thought he was. As she watched, she could see the muscles move beneath his skin when he fidgeted under her gaze. Of course, he wouldn't actually have muscles, only more snow - knowing that didn't make the illusion less convincing. Her lips still felt the faint chill of his touch.

"Who are you?" Elsa whispered.

"Jack Frost," he said, holding out a hand again. Again, Elsa refused to take it.

"Did I create you?" Elsa asked. Olaf had been created through her subconscious desire to reconnect with her sister, a symptom of her attempt to close herself off to the world. If she'd done it again -

"Olaf created me," said Jack.

"He -"

"He has the same power as you, though not quite as strong," said Jack. "I do too. Olaf was just trying to make you happy."

"By raping me?" she asked.

"No!" cried Jack, looking aghast. "I would have stopped as soon as you said something, or showed the slightest sign of being upset, we just thought that you would never go for it if I were formally introduced to you, so if I came to you while you were on the edge of wakefulness you would be more receptive. And it nearly worked, you were responding well -" He caught her look and swallowed hard, another impeccable mimic of a real human. "It was supposed to be like Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty."

"I've never liked that story," said Elsa. "Olaf and I have some talking to do."

Elsa got up from her bed and swept past Jack, noiselessly splitting open the ice to give access to the door. Now that she knew what he was, her fear had begun to leave her. She could kill or immobilize with a thought, and that would go double for a man made of ice. Nonetheless, she shifted her clothing, putting in plates of compressed ice and cascading a thin sheet of snow above her head into a hood. To this she added a long flowing cloak that hid the armor, the better to not alarm anyone who saw her, though she knew a single glance at Jack would raise more than enough probing questions.

She found Olaf in the sitting room. Jack stood behind her, looking nervous, but Elsa couldn't have cared less about how he felt.

"Olaf, what have you done?" asked Elsa.

"You were lonely, so I made you a companion," said Olaf with a pout. "I was just trying to make you happy. You don't like him?"

"Olaf, I didn't even know you could do this, that your power extended so far," said Elsa.

"You could make them like this too," said Olaf with a hopeful smile.

"I've told you why I don't," said Elsa. "Did you stop to think about what it would mean?" She gestured to Jack. "He's a person now, he can't just be unmade."

"I know that," said Olaf. "But you'll like him if you give him a chance, and if you don't like him he can change!"

"Do you understand why what you did was wrong?" asked Elsa. "Do you promise not to do it again?"

"I screwed up?" said Olaf. "I'm sorry. If I'd known you'd have a problem with it, I wouldn't have done it."

"Even if I didn't have a problem with it, it would still be wrong," said Elsa.

Olaf shifted from foot to foot for a moment. "I kinda sorta don't agree," he said. He held up his icicle hands. "I get where you're coming from and all, but if I think about all the things I want to do, and I think about how happy I am that I was created by you, I feel like making more people can't be a bad thing, and it will help us to do more for the world, and for ourselves, right? And yesterday you were saying that there was a lot of work that had to go into making a person, and that you didn't want all the responsibility, so I thought that we could get around all that by having me make a person, and I did it for you."

Elsa used her power to reach into his mind. It was a different place than the day before, with more changes to his patterns of thought in the space of twelve hours than in the entire six years before. Yet as she looked around, she could still see that he'd been acting with good intentions. She felt herself soften somewhat. She had said that he was her responsibility, and she had meant it, but he was coming to be so independent of her that even with the ability to look inside his mind it was hard to understand him. Elsa retracted her power and stared at Olaf.

"Olaf, promise me you won't make more," said Elsa.

Olaf kept shifting from foot to foot, looking distressed. "No," he said after a time, and cringed back from her, as if expecting to be struck.

Elsa stared at him. In the past, Olaf, had done as he was asked. He would make mistakes and misinterpret instructions, and sometimes even complain, but he always made an honest effort to do as he was asked. It would have been easy for Elsa to reach inside his head again and change him, to snap him into obedience, but she wasn't confident in her ability to do that without breaking him in some unexpected way. Besides that, while she thought making a new person was ethically questionable and fraught with peril, she had little doubt that altering a person's fundamental being without their consent was an act almost beyond redemption. The trolls had done it to her sister, and she'd never forgiven them. Doing the same or worse to Olaf was out of the question.

She could lock Olaf up, but that would hardly be any better, and if he were really set on defying her, he could escape from practically any prison she could build, given that he had access to the same powers she did. She could freeze iron to be so brittle it would shatter, and no chains could keep her for long. A prison of ice would fare even worse. The same would be true of him.

Elsa decided to take a third way.

It had been a little more than five years since Anna had gotten engaged to Kristoff. Elsa had wanted to put her foot down, to make them wait longer, especially after what had happened with Anna's first so-called love. Elsa liked Kristoff, but he hadn't been family then, and the speed of their relationship was worrying. She was queen, and could have simply stopped the ceremony from happening, but she knew that the end result of that would be a more distant relationship with her sister. So instead she'd put her heart into making the wedding a nice one, and helping the two of them in whatever way she could. If Anna was going to throw caution to the wind, then Elsa would stand behind her and make sure that everything went well, from the wedding to the marriage itself.

"Alright," said Elsa finally. "You can make more. Talk to me before you do it though, and I will help to make them. I don't want anything to go wrong, and if you're going to do it, you're going to do it right."

Olaf ran forward on his stumpy legs and gave her a hug, and Elsa reluctantly returned it.

"What about Jack?" Olaf asked, his face buried in her ice dress.

Elsa turned to look at Jack, a man made of ice in a misguided attempt at curing her of her loneliness, delivered in the worst possible way. She had no idea what was to be done with him, only that she wouldn't destroy him.

"I could be your assistant?" he asked.

Elsa nodded. "That will work. The floodgates have opened, I'm afraid, and it would do my subjects well to see me with one of the new breed. Olaf, how many more were you planning on making?"

"I don't know," said Olaf. "I'll ask before I do though, I promise. Thank you."

"I'm going back to bed," said Elsa. "No more interruptions."

* * *

In the morning, Olaf asked for permission to make the frozen sailors for Admiral Pyke, and Elsa had reluctantly agreed to meet him at the docks later in the day. After a quick breakfast of rabbit stew and quail eggs, she met with the duke of Weselton.

"So he's smarter?" asked the duke without preamble, the indiscretions of the previous day seemingly forgotten.

"It seems that way," said Elsa. "Also, I have a surprise for you, something that I think you'll like investigating. A peace offering of sorts. Jack?"

Jack stepped out from the doorway, a grin on his face. "Yes, your majesty?"

"My god," said the duke. "He's … he's made of ice and snow."

"Olaf made him," said Elsa.

"Olaf?" asked the duke. "The snowman, that Olaf?"

"He's smarter, as you said. He has goals now, and he'd making use of cryokinesis in achieving them," said Elsa. "You'll see more men like these from now on."

"So lifelike," muttered the duke. He stepped towards Jack. "But why?"

"Why?" asked Elsa.

"Why make it look like a human?" asked the duke.

"I'm a him," said Jack with a frown.

"Yes, of course you are," said the duke with a laugh. "But my question is why, if Olaf could make another frozen creature, would he make it like that? What's the purpose of the clothing, of the eyelids? Surely those eyes have no need to blink. And he's propelled by magic, not by muscles, but the look of everything, it's all - well, perfect."

"Thank you," said Jack. "And the reason I was created like this is that Olaf originally intended me to be Elsa's groom." Elsa stifled a groan; she could have done without that information being known to anyone. She would have to have a discussion about discretion with Jack at a later date.

The duke sat back in his chair with his mouth hanging half open.

"And … and is that plan … I mean, the controversy it would cause, not to mention that your line would end there -"

"No," said Elsa. She was thankful that when she blushed it was nearly imperceptible. "Olaf acted in error."

"Oh, thank god," said the duke. "For a moment I thought that you'd taken leave of your senses." He sipped at a cup of tea beside him. "Well, this is certainly interesting, and has some wonderful implications. You could have a whole workforce without the trouble of making them yourself, if you so choose. I'd talked of eliminating work for the people of Arendelle, and this makes it much easier by a wide margin. Why, you'd only have to make the first worker, and instruct him to make more workers, and then -"

"Have you heard the tale of the sorcerer's apprentice?" asked Jack. "He enchants a broom to fetch water from a well, and soon the floor is awash in water. He tries to murder the broom, but when chopped in half it regrows into two more brooms, which work at double the speed. I believe that our queen has some fear of such a scenario."

"But you see!" said the duke. "You can reason through these things, and not make the same errors. The broom in that story was mindless in its task, the same cannot possibly be said for you or Olaf."

"My queen worries of new errors, different errors that we might not be able to see coming until it was already too late," said Jack. Elsa smiled at him, despite herself. It felt good to have someone on her side in one of these exchanges.

"Does that mean no more new intelligences?" the duke asked Elsa. "You're putting a stop to it?"

"No," said Elsa. "Jack serves as a proof of concept of sorts." And she wasn't willing to turn Olaf into an adversary. "We'll move ahead. Slowly, though. We're meeting with Admiral Pyke later in the day, to see about getting him the crew to man the ships I've been making him."

"I know that you've had your concerns," said the duke, "But I don't see how this can be anything but a good thing. Now, if we're to meet later today, I have other business to attend to, as I promised your sister that she could have harsh words with me." He bowed to both of them, and left quickly, seeming far too happy for Elsa's tastes.

"Thank you," said Elsa to Jack.

"He can be excitable," said Jack. "A man of ideas. I know most of what Olaf knew of him."

"He's an advocate for progress," said Elsa. "We have a complicated friendship."

"I can imagine," said Jack.

"Do you know, you really don't seem like you were born yesterday," said Elsa.

"Oh, if I'm by your side you'll see more than a few blunders, I'm sure," said Jack. "Olaf's read quite a few books, but not enough to get a full understanding of how people behave, if that's something you can even learn from a book. I apologized for last night already, but I feel like I have to say I'm sorry again. There's no way to make a second first impression, but I swear that my solitary goal in life is to make your life better, in whatever way I can."

"And what of Olaf?" asked Elsa. "What of his goals? He's become his own person, it seems." Elsa reached out and touched Jack's mind, to look at its inner workings. She didn't ask, and like Olaf, gave no indication that he knew she was doing it as they continued to talk.

"He wants a better world," said Jack. Elsa could see no deception or ill intent, but there was more to his mind that could be uncovered in a brief span of time. She saw a warm red glow that she realized with embarrassment was his love for her, and she slowly closed the connection. Jack continued on. "You might disagree with him, but ultimately you want the same things. I think he knew that when he made me. I was made to be a bridge between you and him, a gift of sorts, but it's clear that I'm lacking in some ways."

"You're not - it's not that," said Elsa. "I like privacy. I like solitude and personal space. You're an intrusion on that, as nice as you might be." She didn't add that he was a glorified snowman.

"I think that you don't really mean that," said Jack. "I think that you push people away because you worry that they'll hurt you or reject you. You don't like the solitude, you only think it's better than the alternative. But I love you, fully and with all my heart, without conditions. Olaf had hoped that would be enough."

"You have a knowledge of love as given to you by a snowman I dreamed up with Anna when I was five," said Elsa.

"All the same," said Jack. He stepped closer to her.

He'd changed his looks in subtle ways. When Elsa had first seen him, he'd been somewhat effeminate, a slender man dressed in a formal outfit. He seemed larger now, more manly - more like the man from her dreams. He was changing to please her, but trying to be careful about it, no single change so extreme that she would have noticed it. He was closer to her now, close enough that she could feel the chill rolling off his body.

"You've altered yourself," she said.

"I have," he admitted. "It might have been better for you to believe that I was my own person, divorced from what you want, but that's simply not the case. I can be anything for you, anyone, you just need to get past thinking about the fact that I'm only that way because you wanted me to."

She could see that he'd given himself more muscles, a figure that filled out his outfit much better and hinted at a brute strength. A part of her was wondering how he knew to change himself in those ways. Another part was worried that she was finding him attractive. She tried to think of him sneaking into her room in the middle of the night, but the memory of violation twisted into a fantasy where she had let him have his way with her. She wanted to stir up some anger or revulsion, or even some bit of common sense that would tell her all the reasons to put him at a distance. She came up short.

"Do you want me to remove that love?" she asked.

"It's what I am," said Jack. "To remove it would be tantamount to murder."

"It'll make you unhappy," she said.

"It doesn't have to," he replied. His eyes seemed to pierce her. She wondered how he had learned that.

"I can't," she said.

"You can," said Jack. "No one has to know. But it's bad to keep your emotions so constrained, to keep your desires buried. I won't hurt you. In fact, I can't hurt you."

"No," said Elsa. It took all her effort to step away from him, to put some distance between them. She could sense something animal in him now, and wondered whether that was only because it was exactly the sort of thing that she'd been wanting - craving, if she was being honest with herself - for a long time.

"Why do you say no?" asked Jack. "We're so far into the realm of the new that there can't possibly be a taboo against it. And you like me already, I can tell."

"You've been alive for less than a full day," said Elsa. "Even if -"

Even if she were lonely, and even if she could admit to liking his touch, and even if it would have been simple to frost the windows and seal the door shut with ice, even then it would still have been a bad idea. She couldn't say it out loud though, because if she did, the reasons would sound too convincing to her.

"Thinking?" asked Jack.

"We should go," said Elsa. "They'll be waiting for us at the docks."

"Certainly, my queen," Jack replied. Elsa couldn't tell whether she'd imagined a faint smile on his face.

The docks were bustling with activity. The merchant fleet of Arendelle had swollen even before the addition of the pykrete ships, and it was clear that the docks would need to be expanded in the near future. Raw goods came into Arendelle, and finished goods left it, all at a pace that nearly beggared belief. The primary limit on Arendelle's growth seemed to be the size of its population, even with a fairly forgiving policy for immigration. Today, they would begin testing a possible solution for that labor shortage.

They talked for three hours before making the first one. The variables involved were staggering, and every time that it seemed they had a complete list of requirements, someone would think of some corner case where their plan wasn't quite ideal. More often than not, that person was Elsa. No one told her that she was being over-cautious but she could tell that they were thinking it, even Olaf, who seemed anxious to get on with things.

Finally it was time. It might have been better with some ceremony, but Elsa was tired of the flashing blue sparks and showers of ice, and so simply snapped her fingers and made the man of ice appear.

He would love the sea, and love sailing for his own sake. He would be loyal to Arendelle, but not overwhelmingly so. He would have access to the power of ice, but hesitant to use it, especially for violence. Elsa would have stripped the ability from him altogether, but she couldn't see a way to do that without dooming him to a slow death from cracks in his body that he wouldn't be able to repair. He would have masculine features, but none of the usual anatomy, both because he'd have no need or desire for it, and because the very thought of making it strained Elsa's sense of propriety (and at the back of her mind, she wondered whether Olaf had gone through the same thing when creating Jack).

She gave him a sense of self-preservation. There was some discussion about how strong that should be. The duke had said that it should be weak, as after all, his life would be worth less than the life of a human, and likely even less than the cargo a ship would be transporting. Olaf had not contributed to the conversation, but Elsa couldn't help but think that he should have taken it as a slight. The admiral had argued that these men would be nearly impossible to kill, and thus self-preservation was hardly an important issue. In the end, Elsa had decided to make the man brave but slow to act.

Much of the rest was left to her subconscious, which would fill in the gaps, and a design that would allow for limited growth. Every roadblock and limitation she engineered into him felt like a betrayal, as though she were intentionally creating a cripple, but she turned her thoughts again to the blizzard that had buried Arendelle, and decided that caution was prudent.

All of that thought had solidified itself into an icy form at the snap of her fingers. He came out looking like a pastiche of various sailors she had known, and he was dressed like them, though that was an unnecessary embellishment. She touched his mind as soon as he was created, and confirmed that it looked like she had intended.

He looked around at them, and nodded to Elsa. "Where's my ship then?" he asked. He was terse and business-like, just as she'd planned.

Olaf made the ones after that, and Elsa checked each one. There were subtle variations in them, slight differences that would bloom into full personalities if given time and differences in stimulus. None of them knew how to sail, since Elsa didn't know, and they would have to be trained, but if she and Olaf had done it right, they would take to it quickly.

Elsa couldn't help but note that their minds were far less complex than either Olaf or Jack's. For some reason, it made her uneasy. The sailors were simple, and easy to check over. Would she know if Olaf started to walk a dangerous path?

They made three hundred in total, enough to sail the pykrete ships. A crowd gathered to watch. She'd expected them to mutter amongst themselves about this expansion of her power, but few people showed the same concern that she did. They'd been living with her ice powers for six years now, and the miraculous had become everyday. Most of them probably worked alongside the snow golems in the mill, and perhaps they couldn't see the difference.

She and Jack walked back to the palace together while Olaf constructed quarters for the sailors. Each would need no more than a small nook, since they needed no sleep and were conditioned for life in the cramped quarters of a ship.

As they walked, Elsa stumbled slightly, and Jack grabbed her arm to steady her. They walked arm in arm after that. He was cold to the touch, in a way that made Elsa feel quite comfortable. It would occur to her only later that he might have been the one responsible for tripping her in the first place, but when she checked his mind she could see no memory of it. Either way, the physical contact felt nice, and if they got some looks she could chalk that up to him being made of snow. A man holding a lady's arm in the street was far from improper.

Elsa stopped by to see Anna. The children were visiting the trolls with Kristoff, giving Anna a much needed rest. Elsa talked about her day, and Anna's frown grew deeper and deeper as she listened.

"I wish you'd change Olaf back," said Anna. "I liked him the way he was. From what you say, he's not so pleasant now."

"I didn't mean it like that," said Elsa. "He's just different."

"And he's getting more different?" asked Anna.

Elsa nodded.

"What happens when he's smarter than you?" asked Anna.

"He might be already," said Elsa. "It's hard to tell. But so long as he keeps being good, I'm not so worried. And if worst comes to worst, I can deal with him."

"You wouldn't want to deal with him now, before he becomes a problem?" asked Anna.

"You wouldn't change your childrens' minds around, would you?" asked Elsa.

Anna gave a light laugh. "That's half of what parenting is," she said. "We just don't have that much control over it. We teach and we make corrections, but it's all about shaping their little minds. And if the children have taught me anything in return, it's that they can be very sneaky if they want to."

"Implying what?" asked Elsa.

"Jack," said Anna. "Do you really think that Olaf didn't know what he was doing, that he made a mistake?"

"I can look inside his head," said Elsa.

"You admitted to me that it was getting harder to tell what's going on there," said Anna. She lifted a cup of mulled wine to her lips. "And he can change his own mind, you said, so he could have removed anything that made him look guilty afterwards."

"I suppose that's true," said Elsa quietly. She could feel Anna's eyes on her.

"And despite that, you actually like him," said Anna.

"He's been our companion for the last six years," said Elsa.

Anna shook her head. "No, not Olaf, Jack - he was made just for you, and you like him all the same. Even if it was part of some unknowable plan."

"Is that wrong?" asked Elsa.

"Well, it's not right," Anna replied.

Elsa had trouble sleeping that night. She'd done away with her mattress years ago, and slept on a bed of snow, which she could shape and fluff as she pleased. The cold had never bothered her, of course. That night though, she couldn't seem to get comfortable, no matter how she shaped the snow beneath her, or how she changed her clothing. Her thoughts kept turning to Jack, and the night before. After two hours of sleeplessness, she redressed herself in a long flowing nightgown and stalked through the palace.

She found Jack in the room that a bewildered steward had made up for him earlier in the day. He was standing at the window, looking out. He didn't react to her entry.

"I'd thought maybe you'd come to my room again," said Elsa.

"No," he replied. He turned towards her. It was dark, and she couldn't read his face.

"I couldn't sleep," she said.

"Oh?"

"Your company wouldn't have been unwelcome, is all I'm saying," said Elsa. "Just for someone to speak with."

Jack looked into her eyes, then strode across the room towards her. Elsa opened her mouth to say something, but he kissed her instead. She had told herself that she was just seeking him out for some company, but she'd known it had been a lie. His lips tasted like ice, as cold and bracing as a mountain spring. She felt like she should push him away, but the truth was that she didn't want to.


	5. Chapter 5

She thought that she would feel guilty afterwards, or somehow debased.

Instead, she felt light and airy, like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulder. There was no second guessing herself, no thinking about whether Jack was a person or not, or the ethics of a man created just to please her. It was simply a bliss that left her feeling like she was floating. It seemed too perfect and too quick, but it had been the same with Anna and Kristoff, and now Elsa could begin to imagine how they'd felt about each other.

Elsa swore him to secrecy. She was happy, not stupid. She debated stealing inside his mind and ripping the memory from him, but she couldn't bear to, and besides that would be compounding one sin with another, and she knew that they would just be together again, no matter what lies she might tell herself.

"Do you still think it's wrong?" asked Jack as they lay side by side.

"Yes," said Elsa. "But I don't care."

"No," said Jack. "More than that. You like that it's wrong. You like the thrill of doing something that you're not supposed to."

Elsa had thought about it, and decided that it was true.

Three weeks passed by quickly, and for a time it seemed like Arendelle was settling into a new rhythm. Olaf took over the work of making the ice sailors and pykrete ships, for which Elsa was grateful. They made plans for several more varieties of the ice people, to take on the most dangerous and unwanted jobs in the kingdom. Elsa drew up new laws to pay a wage to those people who would be put out of work. The mines could be dug deeper with frozen water to widen the cracks in the rock, and bracing a new tunnel could be done in minutes instead of days. The more she thought about it, the less she doubt she felt about it, and eventually Elsa felt a small bit of regret that she hadn't done it sooner.

She spent the nights with Jack, feeling a thrill that never seemed to diminish. It felt ridiculous, to sneak around her own palace, but at the same time Jack was right; she did like doing something wrong. If she were caught, there would be no real consequence. Some people might think less of her, but she was queen, and besides that wielded more physical power than any one person could have a practical use for.

Elsa had just begun to accept the new normal when she saw the first arm made of ice.

"What is that?" she asked the man whose arm it was. She had been walking through the streets of Arendelle with Jack, inspecting properties and making notes about the needs of her subjects when she'd spotted it. It had seemed out of place when she'd seen it, and only after some puzzlement did she realize that the hand of glassy ice was physically attached to an older man with a grey mustache.

"Er, your majesty?" he asked. He seemed nervous, and held his hat in both hands. The icy fingers were as clear as crystal, and looked wrong when set beside the ones of flesh and blood.

"Your hand," said Elsa. "Show it to me if you please."

He'd extended it towards her, and she rolled up his sleeve while trying to ignore the growing crowd. His arm was made of ice until just past the elbow. She had expected the ice to join with a wooden cup that touched a stump. That was a design that she had thought up ages ago, before abandoning the project when she hadn't been able to figure out a way to usefully animate it. Instead, ice was fused directly with the old man's arm joined with a collar of snow. She used her power to trace the boundary between ice and flesh, and could feel spikes of ice driven into the old man's bones.

"Where did you get this?" she asked. She kept her voice soft, restraining her growing anger and horror.

"A man of ice came to me two days ago," the old man said. "I've been without that hand for near on a dozen years now. I lost it to a cannonball in the war. When he offered to make a new one for me, a replacement, well I couldn't say no to that even if I wanted to." He looked between her and Jack. "Only I'd thought that you knew of this, begging your pardon, your majesty."

Elsa had been fuming when she reached the palace.

"Are you going to pretend that you didn't know this would upset me?" she asked Olaf. The last of the season's balls had been held, and so Olaf had taken up the Great Hall as a workshop of sorts. He could often be found there, usually in the company of the duke.

"What's that?" he asked.

"I just met a man with an arm of ice," said Elsa. "He had spikes driven into his bones, work done by one of the ice men that you created."

"It doesn't cause him any pain," said Olaf.

"Do you know if the magic goes away when I die?" asked Elsa. She used her power to open up his mind, but it was hopeless. Olaf's mind was expansive now, and so complex that she had no hope of reading him. She'd have to depend on her wits instead of her power.

"No," said Olaf. "I don't know."

"And if I die, what happens to that man's arm?" asked Elsa.

"If the power evaporates, then it will seize up, and he'll lose it when it melts," said Olaf. "But it's pretty unlikely for you to die, since you don't lead a dangerous life and you don't seem to get sick very often. You can defend yourself if anyone attacks you, and you have Jack to defend you while you're sleeping." Elsa tried her best to show no reaction to that. She couldn't quite tell if that was intended to be a slight against her. "That man was old, and he wasn't likely to outlive you. So if we try to figure out how much of a benefit he gets from having both his hands and weigh that against how terrible it would be to have the ice melt away combined with the low chance that you'll die and the somewhat larger chance that when you die the magic will go away, then I think giving him the hand made the most sense. It was better than not having the hand, even with the risks."

"I'm not mad that you did it," said Elsa with a scowl. "I'm mad that you did it without saying the smallest word to me about it. That is unacceptable."

"If I had asked you before I'd done it, would you have said yes?" asked Olaf.

"I would have had a half a hundred questions about how it works, and I would have to know how it's animated to follow his will," said Elsa. "I might have said yes."

"I already asked all those questions myself," Olaf said. "It's safe, except maybe if you die. He doesn't feel any pain from it. And it helps him. Explaining things to you and getting your permission takes time, and it's always better to do things faster if the result is going to be the same anyway."

"I disagree," said Elsa. "If you're going to simply do what you want regardless of what I think - well, there has to be a way for us to arrive at a consensus."

Jack and the duke were in the great hall with them, both watching the exchange. Neither had said anything. As Elsa looked to the duke, she noticed something off about his stance, and on instinct reached out with her power. Once she had, it was clear why he wore a glove on his left hand.

"No," said Elsa with dismay. "No, you didn't, you couldn't have."

"Your majesty, I can explain," said the duke. "I have my own reasons, and if both Olaf and I are fully aware of the slight risk involved, then it should be none of your concern."

"What reasons?" asked Elsa. "What possible reason could there be? You had a fully functional arm, one that you lopped off to be replaced by … by this mockery."

The duke slipped off his glove and held the frosted hand up to the light. "It's more than simply a duplicate of the hand I had," said the duke. "Of course it is, otherwise what would the point be?"

There was a sharp crack of ice, and the duke's hand had transformed into a sword held up in the air before him. With another sharp crack it became a shield, then what looked like a musket, and finally a fluted glass, which filled itself with melted water. The duke sipped at it and gave a hopeful smile to Elsa.

"You gave him my power?" Elsa asked Olaf.

"He didn't," said the duke. "I asked for it, of course, but the arm is quite limited in the scheme of things, only able to expand to a certain volume and not capable of much in the way of moving parts. Nor can it replicate itself, or divide into different parts. Still, far more useful than my arm once was, and well worth the exchange."

Elsa was aghast. Though there was no sign of it now, she could imagine that the amputation had been done in this very room. And there was still a lingering question, one she wasn't sure she wanted to know the answer to.

"Olaf, how does he control the arm?" she asked. It was the one problem that had stopped her from making a simpler, less extreme prosthetic, the kind that required no permanent alterations. The project would have been a boon to veterans and hard laborers alike.

Olaf was silent for a moment. He and the duke looked at each other for a moment. "There's a sliver of ice in his brain," Olaf began.

Too far. Elsa reached out to Olaf's mind. It was wilderness now, a vast and unknowable mass of things that Elsa could only guess at. All of it was interconnected. There was no safe way to do mental surgery on him, no way to change him back to the way he was without remaking his personality from the ground up. Elsa closed her view of his mind. Then she snuffed out Olaf's life.

The snow that made up his body collapsed to the ground, no longer held together by any magic. The two arms of ice fell and shattered against the floor. In time it would become a puddle, and nothing would be left of Olaf but the carrot that sat in the middle of a pile of snow.

"He was trying to make a better world," said the duke. She could hear the sadness in his voice. She'd expected him to be more distraught.

"Better in whose eyes?" asked Elsa.

"He made duplicates of himself," said the duke. "This isn't over. You've only made things more difficult for the both of you."

Elsa nodded. "I thought that might be the case. I might have done the same, if I were him."

"I didn't - don't - know him perfectly," said the duke. "But I think this was a test that you failed. If it means war -"

"I'll deal with that when it comes," said Elsa. "I think you should leave now."

The duke left slowly, looking back at notes that he clearly wanted to take with him. When he was gone, Elsa and Jack were left alone. Jack hadn't said a word since they'd entered. Elsa turned to look at him. His appearance had changed substantially since that first night, and now he more closely match the man from her dreams. He was rugged and powerful, and knew her better than anyone had before, even her own sister. They'd spent long nights together talking, in his bedroom or hers. It had been a whirlwind romance that was too fast and too perfect.

"He built you to distract me," said Elsa.

"He did," said Jack.

"You knew?" she asked.

"I suspected," he replied.

"You know I can't trust you now?" asked Elsa. "If Olaf were clever, and I think that he was, he might have left instructions hidden from your own thoughts."

"It's possible," said Jack. "But I doubt it. He knew that you could look inside my mind."

"All the same," said Elsa.

"All the same," Jack agreed.

Elsa reached out to touch his mind. She started out thinking that she would kill him too, that she would wipe away everything that made him a person and reduce him to a puddle on the ground. As she looked in his mind though, she saw the memories of their time together, making snow angels in the ice garden, and kissing softly under the moonlight. She didn't know how long she spent replaying those memories, but Jack said nothing the whole time. At the core of his personality was the soft red light, a warm glow of love for her buried in the cold ice. When she found it, she began to weep.

Jack moved towards her and wrapped his arms around her.

"It's okay," he whispered.

She shook her head, but said nothing.

* * *

Elsa used her power to feel out the ice and snow in Arendelle. Every time she found one of the ice men, she probed his mind. She was looking for Olaf, or for instructions that Olaf had buried. If he was going to attack her, he would do it soon. Killing him once had been emotionally difficult, but the hardest part of doing something is often doing it for the first time.

"There are too many to check," said Elsa after a half hour of probing outwards. Anna and Jack sat with her. Anna had been filled in, and though it was abundantly clear that she wanted to say "I told you so", she had so far refrained.

"Was this a part of his plan?" asked Anna. "To make enough creatures that he could hide among them?"

"Not everything was machination on his part," said Jack. "He wasn't evil, not exactly, just a different kind of good."

Anna turned to him. "You think what he was doing was right? Messing around with people's brains?"

There was a tension between the two of them that went beyond mere disagreement. Elsa didn't have time for it.

"He wasn't going to stop," said Elsa. "It would start with a sliver of ice in the brain, and from there - there are possibilities that I've considered, and things that I would never do. Things I can't allow Olaf to do." Flesh converted to ice, her subjects made into creatures of ice and snow, undying and unkillable. The conquest of the known world, and an iron grip of authority. If he could implant a shard of ice in the duke's brain to control an arm, what would stop him from replacing the brain wholesale? "I'm not sure what he would do, and that's why I have to stop him. I should have scooped out his mind the moment -" She looked to Jack. "I should have stopped him earlier."

"Is this going to become a war?" asked Anna. "Do I need to move the kids away?"

"I don't know," said Elsa. "I don't know what his next move is, because I don't really know what really motivates him. Before the duke fled, he said that Olaf had been testing me, but I don't know to what end. And I don't know whether Olaf would try to kill me, since I don't know whether he believes that his life will end with mine."

"He has other options if he wants you neutralized," said Jack.

"I know," said Elsa. It would be nearly impossible to build a prison to hold her, but putting her in a coma would probably work. There were poisons that could accomplish that, or magics. She could also imagine an icicle piercing her brain, giving her a lobotomy. Elsa let out a long sigh. "I need to find his duplicates and put them down. I can't be constantly worried about retribution. And even if retribution isn't in his design, I can't let him go to such extremes."

"What are you going to do?" asked Anna.

"Escalate," Elsa replied.

She designed a new construct. It looked like nothing more than a crystal shard, no more than a gilder wide. She gave it a small mind, one bound in a thousand different ways and simpler that even the snow beasts that ran the mills. It had only a single objective; to seek out minds of sufficient complexity and destroy them. She carefully crafted an exception for Jack. After a moment's thought, she gave it small wings to flap like a bird, though its movement would be accomplished by its own raw magic instead of proper aerodynamics.

Elsa looked it over and then walked over to the double windows. She threw them open and let her little bird go. One would be nearly useless though, and so she gathered up her power around her and then let it loose in a wide torrent of creation. An outside observer might have thought it was a flock of birds, a seemingly unending stream of them, taking off and departing in different directions.

"They'll find him, one way or another," said Elsa.

Anna stared at her with wide eyes. "How much power do you really have?" she asked.

"An infinite well," said Elsa. "Bound only by concentration and imagination. I've always said that, but I don't think people quite grasp what I mean. I sent the birds to wipe Arendelle clean of anything too complex, but I'm doubtful that they'll manage it. If he's smarter than me, he'll see this coming, though I don't know how he'd plan around it."

There was little to do but wait. Elsa moved out into the ice garden with Jack. Here were her sculptures, immense works of shaped ice that she'd made for the people of Arendelle to view. If she were attacked, she would prefer to see it coming, and fight in the open air where she wouldn't have to worry about anyone around here. The palace would do little to stop Olaf.

"Anna knows about us," said Jack.

"Yes," said Elsa. "Maybe she'd only guessed before, and hadn't know for sure, but … she knows now."

"She thinks it's disgusting," he said.

"I know," Elsa replied. "I have more important things on my mind than my sister's opinion of me."

They sat in silence, waiting for an attack that didn't seem to be coming. The air was mild, and Elsa could hear people talking away in the distance. She hadn't raised the alarm, or notified her subjects. There was little they could hope to do with the information, aside from panic. If Olaf wanted to kill them all, he could do it in the space of several heartbeats.

"Don't hate me," said Jack.

"I don't," said Elsa. "I hate myself for being weak. For being so easily drawn in by you. I was ripe for it, and Olaf saw it. You're a distraction, if not something worse, and I hate that I can't bring myself to kill you. This is what being raised in nearly complete social isolation does to a person, I guess."

Jack frowned. "I wish that there were something I could say to make it better," he said.

"The rational thing to do would be to kill you," said Elsa. Jack said nothing. Perhaps it was clear to both of them that she never would, rationality be damned. "If you break my heart -"

Elsa caught sight of single snow bird flying towards her, one wing slightly torn. It fluttered in the wind, struggling to stay aloft, and Elsa nearly felt sorry for it before realizing it for the theatricality that it was. It was a message from Olaf. She beckoned the bird closer to her, and let it land in her hand. It cringed back from her touch, in obvious pain.

Elsa opened up its small mind. It was a mind too tiny for real pain, and the movements had simply been scripted into it. As a message, it was wholly enigmatic, but the mind showed her clearly where the bird had been - North Mountain, where Elsa had made her palace of ice so long ago. Olaf was waiting for her there, and through the bird's memories she could see his patient stance.

"I'm leaving," she said. "Alone. When I get back, we'll have to figure out what I'm going to do with you." Jack nodded. "If I don't return, tell Anna that I loved her dearly. And tell her that I'm sorry."

Elsa built a horse of ice and mounted it swiftly. She dug her heels into its sides, and felt it surge beneath her. Olaf had refrained from sending an assassin. In return, Elsa would allow him the courtesy of a conversation.


	6. End

North Mountain was completely uninhabited. At the peak, the air was too thin for trees to grow, and aside from the occasional fool who wanted the challenge of a climb, it was completely deserted. It had been the perfect place to build her ice palace. It was solitude incarnate. If she had been thinking clearly, she would have sealed the ice palace off from any intruders by destroying the staircase and building a wall twenty feet high. And if she had, everyone in Arendelle would have died from the cold without her even knowing about it.

That had been six years ago. Elsa hadn't returned since then. The ice palace had cracked and collapsed, and been buried in snow. When Elsa reached out with her power, she could feel it there. Near it stood a new structure. It looked something like a cannon, pointed straight at the sky. The base was cracked - it had already been fired. Olaf stood in front of it, waiting for her. He looked the same as ever, small and innocent. No one could ever find him threatening.

"Hi," he said, when she was within earshot.

She leapt from the horse and stalked through the snow towards him. She reached out and touched his mind, making sure that she could still feel it. A small surge of relief flowed through her when she found nothing blocking her. She'd worried that he would find a way to stop her, but there was no resistance. She was ready to destroy him at a moment's notice.

"What is that thing?" Elsa asked, nodding to the immense structure.

"The air gets colder the higher you go," said Olaf. "And the air gets thinner too. It's kind of ideal for a person made of snow. So I thought that higher would be better for making a home, and the natural conclusion was to look to the stars."

"It's not an observatory," said Elsa.

"No, it's a - well, we don't really have the words for it, but it's a cannon that can shoot things into orbit around the earth, or beyond," said Olaf. "I'd show you how it works, but I don't think you're interested."

"Do you know why I killed you?" asked Elsa.

"Nope," said Olaf with a grin. "That was a different me. I can guess though. And I can't really say that I blame you."

"No?" asked Elsa.

He shrugged. "Sometimes force can solve problems."

Elsa tensed, thinking that perhaps that would be the words he'd choose to launch an attack against her. "Are you going to try to kill me?" she finally asked.

"No," said Olaf. "That would be wrong. And I like you." He tapped his hands together. "And there's the question of ontological intertia. I've done a lot of reading, and my doubles have done deeper investigation. There was a war between genies in Arabia, and when it was over, and one of the genies was defeated, all of the changes he had made were undone with him. The princess of Corona lost her magic hair, and when she did, the woman whose age she'd been reversing suffered centuries of age at once. There are other examples, enough that even if it weren't wrong to kill a person, and even if I didn't like you, I still wouldn't try to kill you just on practical grounds."

"You're passing judgement on me," said Elsa. "For killing you."

"I don't think you'd disagree with me if I said you had your flaws," said Olaf. "We just disagree with what they are."

"You wanted everyone to be made of ice," said Elsa.

"I want to put an end to death," said Olaf. "I want to put an end to work, and to the whole idea that things have to be scarce. I don't want people to starve to death. I don't want people to be tortured. Changing people into ice seemed the easiest way to do that, if they were willing. And after the first few, it would have gained acceptance, and more people would have converted, and eventually what was once was small niche thing that people got worried about would be fully accepted, and social pressure would swing the other way, until the creatures of flesh and blood were no more."

"You knew that I wouldn't stand for that," said Elsa.

Olaf nodded. "I suspected, anyway. I just didn't know what you would do about it. You had lots of options available to you. And you chose to kill me. Do you know how many of me those birds took out before I could send one back to you? Hundreds."

"What now?" asked Elsa. "We go to war?"

"I'm leaving," said Olaf. "I'm going outside of your reach. By this time next year, the earth will be so insignificant in the grand scheme of things that it might as well not exist."

"You'll leave us alone?" asked Elsa.

"No," said Olaf. "I can't let people suffer. But I'll try to be subtle. I'll make disease vanish from the face of the earth. People will live long, healthy lives. Accidents won't happen. Eventually people will start to talk, but they won't know what the cause is. I don't know how to do all of it yet, but I know more every day, and eventually we'll have a slow utopia. I'll be a gentle god."

"Do you expect me to believe that?" asked Elsa.

"No," said Olaf. He sounded sad. "I expect you to create more killers to hunt me down. I expect you to try tracking me by the miracles that I make. But I care about you, and I owe you, and so I'm willing to play these games. People are going to die this way. If you weren't standing in my way, or if I could bring myself to do one of a hundred terrible things to you, I could save hundreds of thousands more lives. I can see that part of me that values you, that makes that trade off worth it. I'm not perfect. Neither are you. Maybe someday we will be."

Elsa was silent. It wasn't a victory, but it would have to do. "When did you start making the duplicates?" she asked. "When was it already too late?"

"I made a dozen the night that I made Jack," said Olaf. "We split up, the better to protect ourselves from a terminal threat." He paused. "Jack didn't know."

"Why did you make him?" she asked. She didn't want to, but she couldn't stop herself.

"There's a good chance that you'll take me with you when you die," said Olaf. "Until I can figure out a way to stop that from happening, or prove that won't be the case, I need you to be safe. Jack is there to protect you. He loves you so that you would love him back, and keep him by your side."

"I can protect myself," said Elsa.

Olaf said nothing, and turned back towards the structure, working to repair the cracks and prepare it for a second firing. The conversation was over. Elsa debated killing him, but didn't see that it would accomplish much, aside from giving her some satisfaction. There were surely duplicates. She walked through the snow, back to the horse she'd made, and took off back to Arendelle.

* * *

Elsa used her powers more aggressively in the months after. The more she thought about Olaf, the more she thought that he had a point. The elimination of death, and abolition of work, theses were goals with a certain nobility to them. She drew up a plan to use the power of ice to progress her kingdom forward. She took the idle people and offered them jobs, and within half a year, Arendelle became a center of scholarship as well as manufacturing. She built towers of ice for housing, and an immense library with a full collection of books from all over the world. Elsa founded what she called the Winter Union, a group that included only Arendelle at first but rapidly expanded to include a large number of kingdoms. She controlled the weather of all the member polities, and expanded the industries of ice beyond the borders of her home kingdom.

There were hints of Olaf. Her scholars had tracked down tales of a genie of cosmic power in the Cave of Wonders in Arabia, but when she went there herself, propelled at incredible speeds on a road made of ice, she found it empty. There was no way that Olaf would hear a tale like that and not investigate it himself. Secret potions of the Incan empire, a plant from Corona that healed the sick, and foul magics from the deeps of the ocean, all were stolen before she could track them down. Olaf hunted the wonders of the world, finding them before Elsa could. To what end, she couldn't say.

There were other signs. As Olaf had promised, the world became a better place. People grew sick less often. Accidents became infrequent. On occasion, ships would report that they were moments from capsize when the sea was coated in ice, stopping them in place. And there were other, darker signs, ones that kept her up at night. On occasion, the dying would vanish from their rooms, leaving nothing but frost behind. Storms of ice aided revolutionaries in taking over a kingdom. From time to time, a story would reach her about limbs made of ice. Olaf wouldn't kill, but he had little qualms about causing chaos and destroying property. No one else seemed to notice, but then few people had as much access to information as Elsa did. She sent out agents, even some of the ice people Olaf had left behind, but nothing was ever found. Olaf worked in the shadows.

"You're keeping Jack for good then?" asked Anna over breakfast one morning.

"I know you disapprove," said Elsa.

"Are the two of you …" Anna trailed off.

"Yes," said Elsa.

"People are talking," said Anna.

"They talked before," said Elsa. "They whispered about me in the taverns, and made up perversions far worse than what I'm doing now."

Two years later, Elsa announced a formal engagement to Jack. No one knew what to make of it, and Elsa lost much of the goodwill she'd been gaining. Anna and Kristoff didn't understand, but tried their best to be supportive. She knew that they found it creepy, and tried not to care. It meant that Anna's children would take the crown, but Elsa continued to stay the same age, so perhaps that point was moot. The marriage was legal only because Elsa was queen. She'd made the wedding a small one, with few guests.

Nine months later, she was pregnant.

What followed were seemingly endless months of anxiety and boundless questions about how that could be possible. Elsa was worried that the infant would come out stillborn, or as a creature of pure snow, and perhaps the former would be preferable to the later. Jack was the father, however that had worked, and Elsa was frightened to no end by what the result would be. As it turned out, the pregnancy and birth were purely ordinary, with no complications or surprises, save for the fact that the baby girl's skin was cool to the touch. It was exactly what Elsa would have wished for from a genie, and Elsa thought that perhaps she owed Olaf a great deal for that particular miracle. People began to take it for granted that Elsa defied conventions wherever she pleased, and the controversy eventually settled down.

Sometimes she wondered at Olaf's true design. There were days that she thought she was an arrow, fired from his bow to arrive at precisely the center of some target. His rebellion and the conversation they'd had on the mountain had changed her, in ways that she could barely put into words. Her life had more purpose now than it ever had before, and for the first time in forever, she was truly happy. Perhaps that was an outcome that Olaf had intended all along. She tried not to think about it too hard.

Her astronomers reported seeing new planets in the heavens, white specks that could only have been created by Olaf. He had taken to the stars, as he'd promised.

She might have been imagining things, but some nights she looked up at the moon and imagined that it was a bluer shade of white.


End file.
